Brush Technology is producing an updated range of aftermarket municipal brushes. These one-piece belly brushes are designed to work on all modern municipal truck-mounted sweepers such as Scarab, and Johnston trucks.

Prior to the introduction of these one-piece brushes (also commonly known in the trade as 'belly' or 'wide sweep cylinder brushes') they consisted of a reusable steel cylinder shaft wrapped in segmented wafer rings of bristles. Every time the brush needed changing, the old wafer rings had to be removed, and the new ones reassembled with suitable spacers onto the old shaft.

Comparatively the one-piece belly brush is very simple as it only requires the old brush to be removed and the new one attached. One local customer (Admec) has told Brushtec that: "It used to take around 30 minutes to replace a used and dirty belly brush with a new and clean one, and now it only takes 10."

The benefits of this brush range are immediate. Used street cleaning brushes are always dirty, and may have hazardous debris trapped amongst the bristles'; the one piece brush removes the operator's need to be in contact with this dirt, and saves time to boot.

Although the one piece cylinder brushes are more expensive to produce than the old wafer segment brush, Brush Tec has invested heavily in both tooling and robotic assembly to drive down the cost of manufacturing. Extra-long life bristles help increase the brush performance, and another customer (Wm Hamilton) has found that "The lifespan of the one-piece wide sweep is around double that of the segmented type."

Two versions for each machine are available, a standard heavy duty and the two colour extra heavy duty 'Blue Zebra'. This is designed to be used by road planing contractors to move large volumes of road planings.

This range is produced at Brush Tec's Newcastle facility, using a post-consumer recycled polypropylene core/tube.